Things in Glocca Morra

By Peter Collier

“What’s the point of being Irish anyway if you don’t think the world will break your heart?” asks Jack Kennedy. He is spellbound by a song about Ireland’s neverland of dreams: “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?”

No one better knew the real JFK’s dreams and passions than Lem Billings, a prep-school roommate who made himself “sidekick everlasting.” The late Peter Collier had the great fortune to obtain oral histories from Billings himself, and they became the basis for a vivid biographical novel in Lem’s voice. On assignment with the Hearst newspapers, Jack goes with Lem to Hollywood, that neverland of dreams he loves for “the feeling that something might happen.” Things do. Communists and gangsters vie for control of the unions. There are labor strikes, blackmail, assassinations. And there are glamorous actresses. Joseph Kennedy Sr. hovers oppressively over his son and aims to derail his romance with Valentina, survivor of an Italian prison camp and daughter of a mobster.

The world breaks Jack’s heart, and he dives into politics with steely purpose. But the interlude in Hollywood sends ripples through the Kennedys’ lives. When Lem gets the news of JFK’s assassination, he instantly thinks of Val’s father—a man whose middle name is vendetta. Billings never got the answers he sought about Jack’s death. As for his intimate knowledge of the Kennedys, he remained ever discreet, but left a trove of recollections to be opened by a later generation. Conveyed through Collier’s lively and imaginative prose, they illuminate shadowy corners of an extraordinary American saga.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781641771351

Peter Collier

Peter Collier has worked as an author and editor for over forty years. During that time, he has written novels, short stories and screenplays, along with bestselling biographies. His works include The Kennedys: An American Dream and The Anti-Chomsky Reader, both with David Horowitz.

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New York

January 31, 1981

ONE

We’re condemned to live our lives forward and understand them backward.

That’s how Ted Sorenson, expert ransacker of Bartlett’s and word man par excellence, dumbed down the gem from Kierkegaard in one of his speeches for Jack. Today the maxim is displayed on marquees outside high schools all over the country at graduation time, but in 1961 it was still fresh and very much in synch with the faint whiff of existentialism that mysteriously attached itself to the Kennedy presidency. A dedicated Ciceronian himself, Jack loved the heft and balance of the phrase, but acting on its mandate was another thing altogether. For him, as for all the Kennedys, the unexamined life was not only worth living, but a necessity.

That I myself am understanding backward in this form, at this time, is the result of a visit from an archivist named Daniel Goldman a week ago. When the Kennedy Library called to ask if I would meet with him, I knew word had reached Boston that my actuarial tables had been turned and it was time to suction out whatever privileged information I still possessed about the President before my heart, which sometimes beats as fast and feebly as a hummingbird’s, decides to call it a life.

I told them I would talk to this Mr. Goldman but probably not say anything.

I was watching the sparrows grubbing in the dirty snow of my window box when he got out of the cab on Fifth Avenue three stories below and hunched into the wind chill’s blast. I identified him by the industrial-strength briefcase and the brisk librarian’s walk. It was three minutes until two; by the time he reached my apartment he would be exactly on time. I thought of telling him that one of Jack’s favorite aphorisms was Punctuality is a virtue of the mediocre.

Goldman emerged from the elevator and became distorted in my peephole, his fingers combing strands of hair from the side of his head over a balding crown. He was probably not much over forty, but his jowly face had already capitulated to gravity.

I opened the door on the first knock and gestured him to the sofa, where he sat as demurely as a deb, spine straight and knees together. A photo above the highboy showing Jack and me as teenagers getting ready to zoom into life in his Ford Roadster caught Goldman’s eye like flypaper.

That’s you and the President.

Yes, when we were a work in progress.

Taken at the family home?

Hyannis, yes.

He studied the image closely, then gave an unctuous smile: People always speak of yours as a somewhat unlikely friendship.

The passive aggression in unlikely was irksome. But he was right, of course. One of our patrician Choate classmates once said to my face, It is as odd of Kennedy to choose a mooncalf like you as his best friend, Billings, as it was of God to choose the Jews.

Later on, the New Frontiersmen too were baffled by my privileged position. Who was this clown who was always the first one pushed into the deep end at the Kennedy pool parties; the onetime literature major able to recite Dover Beach on cue while everyone else in the administration was speaking in prosy realpolitik; the extra man for unaccompanied women at important dinners; the big guy with the high-pitched voice and Coke-bottle glasses who could always be counted on to drink out of the dribble cup in front of Haile Selassie or plop down unawares on a whoopie cushion at the state dinner for Malraux?

And why was this doofus allowed to sit in on important meetings and even have overnight privileges at the White House?

Then someone in the know would tell them: Billings has been around forever; nobody knows why, but he’s the President’s second self.

The two of you first met at prep school. Goldman was still warming me up.

That’s right.

That’s a moment you must remember well, he said with fine-tuned aggression.

I noticed that he was jiggling one foot rapidly to ward off urination or worse.

The facilities are that way if you need to use them. I pointed to the bathroom down the hall.

Thank you. A long trip from the airport. He immediately hustled off.

Of course I remember. It occurred at exactly 4:17 on the afternoon of September 8, 1930. I had arrived at Choate by taxi about an hour earlier, a social misfit who’d already been expelled from two other prep schools, less for infractions than as a result of an obtuse inability to fit in. I was sitting on the unoccupied bed in our dorm room picking at the cracked and bleeding eczema on my elbows that testified to how deeply I was rejecting myself those days and staring at my wristwatch in the hope that time would fly me out of the life I had led up until that moment.

It was 4:17 when I happened to look up and see a skinny boy with gray-green eyes in a white T-shirt and khakis leaning against our doorjamb with the filtered backlight picking up the honey-colored accents in his hair.

What are you doing in my room? That blunt-force Boston accent hit my ears for the first time.

They put me here.

Oh, so you’re the new kid.

I resumed staring at my watch, but I knew that he was evaluating my precocious size—six feet tall and 150 pounds at the age of thirteen.

Do you play football?

I’d like to, I mumbled hopefully, unaware that I had just sentenced myself to decades of hiking the ball and blocking for a variety of Kennedys who alone were allowed to pass and run in our games.

What’s your name?

Lemoyne Billings.

Lemoyne? A sly smile bloomed in time lapse on the triangular face. No, that doesn’t sound right. You must mean LeMoan? Of course: Le-Moan Billings. Now there’s a distinguished name.

Lemoyne, I repeated.

That’s what I said, he eyed me. LeMoan.

The rest of that day—the rest of our lives together, really—Jack continued to chew on my name. After LeMoan, it was Pneumoan. Then Lemon. Then Le Monde. Then Lerman. Then Lemur. Then Lemmer. Then Lemming. And so on, until I came to feel that I was whoever he wanted me to be at any given moment, which I suppose was exactly his intention all along.

When we returned that evening from a silent meal in the dining hall, I went to a corner of the room and changed into my pajamas with my back to him. He turned on the radio, stripped to his underpants, got in bed, and began leafing through his worn modern English version of Le Morte D’Arthur. Then, as Paul Whiteman’s Willow Weep for Me came on, he jumped up and began foxtrotting to the music with his arms around an imaginary partner. When he knew he had my attention, he stopped in the middle of the room and turned his back, then slowly bent down until his head was upside down near his knees and he was looking at me from under his crotch.

What are you doing? I pulled the covers up tighter around my neck.

My exercises, he replied. I have walking leukemia. At least that’s what the doctors call it. They’ve told me that I’d better learn to kiss my ass goodbye, and that’s why I do my spine exercises every night.

That last comment pushed my on-button. Feeling like Lazarus called forth from the dead life I’d led until then, I promptly signed on as Jack’s companion and connoisseur; his accomplice and all-purpose yes man; second fiddle in his one-man band.

He had just begun his guerrilla campaign against Choate (or Chode, as he naturally called it, having located what he regarded as the perfect pun for the school in the term describing that obscure area of transition between the genitals and anus) for trying to scrub off him the last stain of shanty Irish that might yet cling to the Kennedys. He assumed as a matter of course that I would join him in his minor anarchy, and I did.

For two weeks, the two of us emerged after lights off to flush cherry bombs down the toilets; drench the cook’s sanitary napkins in strawberry preserves and put them on display in the cafeteria; salt the head custodian’s hemorrhoid cream with itching powder; and generally wreak havoc.

It all ended the minute Choate’s imperious headmaster George St. John sent a haughty letter of complaint to the Kennedys.

The Old Man is pissed, Lemuel, Jack told me after fielding the scorching call from home. He said for you to come with me to Thanksgiving so that we can get things straightened out.

At this time the Kennedys were living up in Westchester County in the town of Bronxville in a twenty-room brick colonial originally built for Anheuser-Busch. The Old Man was creating the items on his CV faster than a secretary could type them: the Big Bear prowling for tasty scraps on the floor of the Depression; momentary Hollywood mogul; political insider climbing the greasy pole of the New Deal; not to speak of his scrupulously redacted extralegal activities, alluded to later in a story told by Paul Ricca at a lunch arranged by Bobby (who had distantly befriended the aging Chicago Mob boss while investigating him as attorney general) in which Ricca described a locally famous shootout between the Old Man’s Irish thugs and the tough Jews of Detroit’s Purple Gang during Prohibition over rights to smuggle Canadian whiskey that left three Hibernians and a pair of Semites done for, as he put it.

When we arrived, Jack headed straightaway to the Old Man’s office, towing me along by the invisible cord that already connected us.

He knocked on the door and a raspy voice within yelled Come! We entered and I caught my first sight of the founding father himself. His suspenders were off his shoulders and hanging below his waist, and his red polka dot bowtie was unknotted at his neck. He was tilted back in his chair with his feet up on his desk shouting into the speaker of the candlestick telephone he held with one hand while jamming the receiver to his ear with the other. Behind him was a stunning woman only a few years older than Jack and me. She wore a purple kimono and bangle earrings that flashed like fishing lures within the cotton candy swirl of her bright blond hair.

Because Jack always referred to him as the Old Man, I had formed an image of Mr. Kennedy as a forbidding Pentateuch patriarch. But in the flesh, his thinning strawberry blond hair and freckled face made him look youthful and almost innocent, at least until you looked into the gelid blue eyes behind the rimless glasses. They told the truth: here was a man whose golden rule was to do unto others before they did unto him.

Hi, Jack. The blonde vamped us while the Old Man continued to rage on the phone.

Hi, Wanda, Jack grinned.

Just then the Old Man snarled, Listen you prick! You get that goddamn stuff into the warehouse tonight or else! Then he slammed the receiver back into the cradle and stared malevolently at the phone for a moment before turning to us.

Jack froze. A fluttering sensation took wing in my stomach when the Old Man looked me over as if wondering how I would taste for lunch.

Get this, Jack! he finally spoke. I don’t want you ever to do anything that will give that son-of-a-bitch headmaster of yours the right to chap my ass again!

I won’t, Dad. Jack was meek as an altar boy.

You know I mean what I say, the Old Man growled.

I know you do, Dad.

Okay. Now get the hell out of here while I talk to your friend.

Jack smirked at me as he made his escape.

Mr. Kennedy appraised me again before asking, What the hell is your name anyway, Billings? Jack calls you everything under the sun.

Lemoyne.

He considered it the way someone in the old country might have bitten a coin. Not something I’d name a kid of mine, but no matter. What size shoe do you wear?

Eleven, I gulped.

Perfect! He gave an economical smile.

Then he nodded to Wanda: Run over there and get me that shoe box, will you, Sweetie? She sashayed to the corner of the room.

Wanda’s my secretary, he said in a way that dared me to disagree.

She rummaged around and brought him the box. The Old Man opened it and pulled out a pair of beautiful new cordovan wingtips.

Put these on, he commanded.

The shoes’ gleaming leather had the smell of money. But they were tighter than a bench vise when I laced them up.

Gee, thanks, Mr. Kennedy, I stammered.

He shot me a suspicious glance, then looked at Wanda and barked out a laugh sharp enough to cut air. He thinks I’m giving them to him! Like I’d give thirty-dollar shoes to some goddamn stranger!

He took two quarters out of a glass ashtray on his desk and handed them to me. They’re my size, ten, but they need breaking in. I’ll give you four bits to wear them while you’re here. And whatever you do, don’t scuff the fucking toes!

Jack was waiting for me when I exited the office.

Whew, I exhaled.

I know exactly what you mean, he said, squeegeeing imaginary sweat off his forehead with an index finger.

The rest of that afternoon I watched with numbness creeping up my ankles as the other Kennedys performed in character. Joe Junior, the hair apparent, as Jack contemptuously called him, maliciously dug at a nerve on the side of Cork, the family terrier, making the animal thrash its hind leg idiotically. Rosemary wandered around with a face like an untethered balloon. (Rosie? Oh, she’ll be okay once she gets her grades up, Jack shrugged.) Eunice trotted through the house holding imaginary reins and making whickering noises. Bobby ran into the living room periodically with a look of panic to tell us that the Old Man would be very mad if we didn’t turn down the record player, causing Jack to snarl at him, Drop dead, you little kiss-ass. Pat and Jean made faces because of Teddy’s poopy diapers.

The only one of them who staked a claim on me besides Jack himself was Kathleen. With inset emerald eyes, bisque skin and a pretty, bottom-heavy face, she was as clearly the pick of the female Kennedy litter as he was of the males. The nickname Kick perfectly captured her effervescence. She wore a red hooded coat and an ermine hand muff when the two of us walked around the compound in the chill of that first afternoon and I encouraged myself to fall in love with her on the spot.

The next day, Wanda and I and a silent family priest watched the family members shout at each other all through Thanksgiving dinner in the rich argot of ers, ahs, and ums that functioned as the Kennedy equivalent of glottal clicks. Rose, outfitted in one of the cerise dresses she wore as a distant pun on her name, stared at Wanda for a long time in that cold avian way of hers and then, addressing her as Dear, condescendingly described at great length the religious retreat she and the girls were leaving for the next morning. Wanda tried to pay attention, but seemed to be in physical distress, repeatedly clearing her throat as if trying to dislodge a bone.

I saw Jack purposely let go of his fork and bend down to retrieve it from the floor. He came back up and whispered, Drop your napkin or something and while you’re down there take a look.

When I did, I saw four things underneath the canopy of tablecloth: Wanda’s dress was hiked up; she wasn’t wearing any panties; her pubic bush was black, not blond; and the Old Man was fingering her to beat the band.

Welcome to my world, Jack said under his breath when I came back up. Because I was already established as sidekick for life, had fallen for his sister, and, perhaps equally importantly, my feet were big enough to stretch the Old Man’s shoes, it was now my world too.

When Daniel Goldman re-entered the living room, propelled by the toilet flush, he was looking over his shoulder as if fearful that something might be gaining on him.

As you know, he sat down with the look of someone finally ready to take care of business, "the Kennedy Library is fortunate to have a wealth of materials about the President, but there are still periods in his life we don’t know much about."

Hard to believe, I replied. I thought you had him laid out on the biographical mortuary table, all dissected and examined and stitched back together again.

Far from it, Goldman replied sternly. There are still many lacunae in the record.

Lacunae was obviously a tasty condiment in his mouth, and he paused for a second to let me appreciate its use before continuing.

Take the fall of 1940, for example, he was now reading from notes on a yellow legal pad he’d taken out of his briefcase, when he was at Stanford for a summer session. That’s an episode about which almost nothing is known. It’s one of those blanks we hope you might be able to help us fill in.

Afraid I can’t be of much assistance there, I replied honestly. Jack and I were a couple of years out of college then and I was working at my first real job. I think he went out to Palo Alto on a whim. His brother Joe Jr. was still the focus of the Old Man’s attention then, so Jack was free to remain in his cowboy–Indian chief–fireman phase without having to worry about where he was headed.

Goldman listened with a skeptical look and then cleared his voice before offering a deal: You can be perfectly frank with me in your responses, Mr. Billings, and not have to worry that anything you say will become public before you’re ready. Our interviews are very secure. Some of our subjects seal their oral histories for thirty or forty years after their death before anyone, including scholars, can see them. Their wishes are scrupulously respected.

I forced myself not to ask him what the half-life of plutonium is.

I just want to make sure you know, he continued patronizingly, that you can speak freely without worrying that what you say might cause unpleasantness during your lifetime.

Which we know will not be all that long, I said.

Goldman rolled his eyes in a feigned rebuke of my ghoulishness as his index finger moved to the next item on his page.

Or the time at the end of the war when he was out in Hollywood for several weeks. What about that? This is the longest period of his adult life where we lose sight of him altogether. You certainly must know about this because materials in the files indicate that you were out there with him.

Remembering that Jack always said my face registered lies like a polygraph, I bent over to retie my shoe.

It was so long ago, I came up after taking a deep breath. These days, I’m lucky to remember what I had for breakfast.

But you were there during that time, right?

I nodded.

What exactly did the two of you do? Goldman was in full prosecutorial mode now.

Same old thing. Jack chased women and I held his coat for him when he caught one.

That’s it?

It was only a few weeks.

The archivist plowed grimly ahead: What about his father? Calendar entries I ran across in our files indicate that he was in Hollywood at roughly the same time the two of you were.

It wasn’t a family outing. As you probably know, Mr. Kennedy had been involved in the movie business during the late Twenties and early Thirties, and often spent time in Hollywood afterwards.

How were he and the President relating then?

"Relating? Come on, Mr. Goldman, as a student of this family you’ve got to know that whether he was fourteen or forty and whether he was in Hollywood or Hyannis, the greatest problem Jack Kennedy faced, almost until the day he died, was not the Cuban missile crisis or the civil rights movement or Berlin or Vietnam. It was his father and how to keep him at bay."

Thanks for all this—very valuable, Goldman said insincerely as he put his yellow pad back in the briefcase and moved to Plan B. The other thing I hoped to discuss with you during this visit is primary source materials—letters and other items we know you accumulated during your long relationship with the President.

I was not surprised that rumors about my little archive had reached Boston, probably via Jackie, who always spends some time rummaging around in it when she drops by to encourage me to adopt what she calls, in that breathy voice of hers, a healthier lifestyle.

In fact, I have been cataloguing and cross-cataloguing my letters from Jack since November 22, 1963, when overnight the past became the jail I keep trying to break back into. I have segregated them into batches marked dirty and clean, and annotated each one with a typed gloss explaining the context in which it was written. I tell myself I am serving history. In truth, I manufacture excuses to handle these pieces of paper because they provide the tactile jolt that keeps my heart from giving up.

I do have some correspondence.

Goldman lifted his briefcase onto his knees and rested his forearms on it, leaning forward avidly. I know you’re probably not ready yet to consider gifting them … I began shaking my head, and he made a course correction: … but for now, can you give me a sense of the nature of your holdings?

I stood up, and after the vertigo subsided I walked over to my file cabinet and extracted a couple of manila folders. In the mirror I saw Goldman surreptitiously pull a small tape recorder out of his briefcase.

You don’t mind, do you? he said nervously when I turned around.

I shrugged and sat down with the letters. He slid close to me, holding the mike like an Olympic torch.

This is dated April 13, 1936, I picked a letter at random. Jack had left Harvard for a couple of weeks to go to the family’s second home in Palm Beach to recover from a bout of his mystery illness. I was in my second year at Princeton and he’d asked me to come down and keep him company. He wrote it when I was driving back to New Jersey. I read:

Dear Lemon: The seat of your car must have had a delectable smell after having you sit on it for twenty-four hours. When I get back to school, I’ll have to do some pretty stiff cramming to